Fastest Bus Powered Thunderbolt 2 Storage: Fusion PCIe Flash Drive

Originally posted September 11th, 2015 by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist

You know by know that I am a big fan of the Samsung SM951 flash blade. One of its secrets is lower power usage than other flash blades which makes it the perfect candidate for a bus powered storage device. And only Thunderbolt 2 can come close to using it's full speed potential. Sonnet Technologies saw this and produced the Fusion PCIe Flash Drive.

SMALL RANDOM TRANSFER TEST
We used a range of 4K to 1024K blocks in the Standard Random test in QuickBench as a predictor boot volume 'house keeping' performance and a simulation of an application that does multiple small random transfers. RED graph bar means the fastest overall in Megabytes per Second.

INSIGHTSI've been dreaming of a bus powered Thunderbolt 2 storage device that achieves the maximum real-world speed of Thunderbolt 2. The Fusion PCIe with its fast Flash module is a dream come true.

As you can see from the graph, it rivals the speed of the Tempo PCIe 3.0 SSD -- the same SM951 flash storage module mounted in the PCIe bay of a 2010 Mac Pro tower -- technically bus-powered storage, too.

Finally, up to now, the fastest (and only) bus-powered external flash storage for contemporary Macs used USB 3.0. We included the fastest example of bus-powered USB 3.0 storage (FirmTek miniSwap/U3 with Samsung 850 EVO 6Gbps SSD). You can easily see the advantage of the Fusion PCIe Flash bus-powered Thunderbolt 2 storage device.

One more thing: The Fusion PCIe Flash Drive can be used as Boot Volume.

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